{"id":1897,"date":"2011-08-09T20:21:45","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T03:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hotnerdgirl.wordpress.com\/?p=1897"},"modified":"2024-02-27T08:04:38","modified_gmt":"2024-02-27T08:04:38","slug":"going-apeshit-for-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/09\/going-apeshit-for-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes\/","title":{"rendered":"Going apeshit for Rise of the Planet of the Apes"},"content":{"rendered":"
Best. Photoshop. Ever.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m officially based out of San Diego now and Saturday morning I started the daunting task of unpacking everything I own.\u00a0 Which is a lot of crap.\u00a0 Ugh.\u00a0 But it\u2019s awesome crap that I\u2019m not willing to throw or give away so whatever.\u00a0 Thanks to my OCD and my constant pursuit of organizational perfection, it took me two days just to unpack the kitchen.\u00a0 As my friend Kate puts it, \u201cI wish someone would\u00a0give me a friggin’ chill pill.\u201d\u00a0 After all that hard work I decided that I needed a reward (and a break) so I stumbled over to the movie theatre for some primate prequel goodness.<\/p>\n

I try to be good but y\u2019all know I give stuff away sometimes so here is my customary SPOILER ALERT!<\/p>\n

I honestly wasn\u2019t sure what to expect from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.\u00a0 <\/em>The previews looked pretty good, if a little obviously CGI, and the music sounded fantastic\u2026but hey, it\u2019s the trailer, it\u2019s all the best parts, right?<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LaK6khs8aMw]<\/p>\n

Well, let me tell you, it was actually super good. Like, amazingly good.\u00a0 Like, at least 10x better than I thought it was going to be.\u00a0 As a Navy family, we were stationed in Marin County when I was a kid and I went back to attend college in San Francisco. \u00a0The movie takes place in and around the Bay Area and it definitely made me nostalgic for the fog and the giant redwoods.\u00a0 Hiking and hunting for Ewoks in Muir Woods has always been one of my favorite pastimes so I was thrilled to see so much of them in the movie.<\/p>\n

But first things first.\u00a0 Freida Pinto is seriously the most gorgeous woman ever.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little ridiculous how hot she is.\u00a0 And she has one of those faces that scream \u201ckindness\u201d so she\u2019s totally believable as a vet at the San Francisco Zoo.\u00a0 Oh, and did I mention that she\u2019s beautiful?<\/p>\n

Now that that\u2019s out of the way, let\u2019s move on to James Franco as Will Rodman, a genetic engineer who has formulated the cure for Alzheimer\u2019s.\u00a0 Not because he wants to help humanity per se, although that\u2019s certainly a positive side effect, but because his Father (John Lithgow) has the disease and he\u2019s a total daddy\u2019s boy.\u00a0 After his presentation to the board goes bust and the human trials get canceled, Will goes so far as to smuggle some of the drug, ALZ-112, out of the lab in order to experiment on his own Dad.\u00a0 It works brilliantly at first but it\u2019s virus-based and eventually the antibodies grow strong enough to negate the benefits of the treatment.\u00a0 Bummer.\u00a0 Back to the drawing board.\u00a0 About 2 movie days later (or the equivalent of 10 years in the real world) Will comes up with ALZ-113, a new virus that must be inhaled instead of injected\u2026.seriously\u2026never a good sign when something is airborne.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to give away what happens next for those who haven\u2019t seen it but let\u2019s just say that I\u2019m very happy that zombies weren\u2019t the result.\u00a0 I was worried for a while there.<\/p>\n

Poor Andy Serkis.\u00a0 The guy has been typecast as the king of non-human CGI critters (Gollum, King Kong, etc).\u00a0 Half the time as an ape!\u00a0 But really, it\u2019s because he\u2019s brilliant.\u00a0 And he is.\u00a0 I just wish he\u2019d get thrown some more roles that didn\u2019t involve him wearing a leotard with a bunch of blinking lights attached to it.\u00a0 He brings amazing life to the chimpanzee\u00a0Caesar. I don\u2019t know if the special effects peeps can measure (or follow or whatever) what his eyes do but I\u2019m thinking that they can.\u00a0 Caesar\u2019s eyes were much too expressive to be completely manufactured.\u00a0 The CGI, by the by, was way better than the trailer made it out to be.\u00a0 In the very first scene of the movie I actually had a hard time figuring out if the chimps looking around were real or fake.\u00a0 With a name like Caesar there\u2019s got to be some kind of sequel to the prequel.\u00a0 That name comes with a dramatic downfall attached to it thankyouverymuch.<\/p>\n

The \u201cbad guys\u201d of the movie are another father-son duo, John Landon (the ageless Brian Cox\u2026seriously, he looks the same as he did 20 years ago, I swear) and his son Dodge (Draco Malf\u2026I mean\u2026Tom Felton).\u00a0 Together they run the San Bruno Primate \u201cSanctuary\u201d.\u00a0 Now, not to go all PETA on y\u2019all but it WAS hard to watch the apes (CGI or no) getting mistreated and experimented on.\u00a0 Unlike some people, I don\u2019t believe the
\npeople behind the movie had any kind of political or animal rights agenda but I can see how it could be misconstrued that way.\u00a0 You\u2019d have to be pretty heartless to not <\/em>feel something when an animal is in pain.\u00a0 Humans on the other hand, well, whatever, who cares.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been desensitized to violence against people since I was a kid.<\/p>\n

With a nephew this cute I had to get him in here somehow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So it wasn\u2019t as hard to witness Dodge\u2019s fate as it was to witness Buck\u2019s, the big silverback gorilla.\u00a0 One thing Draco\u2026I mean Dodge\u2026.does get is the iconic line from the original Planet of the Apes<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give you a hint, it involves the adjectives \u201cstinking\u201d and \u201cdirty.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I was also anxious to see the launch of Icarus <\/em>and the loss of the three astronauts on board.\u00a0 Speaking of which, Charlton Heston isn\u2019t completely absent, a clip from The Agony and the Ecstasy<\/em> shows briefly on the break room television inside SBPS.\u00a0 Need a new drinking game?\u00a0 Every time you find a primate (or human)\u00a0with a name paying homage to someone\u00a0from the 1968 film, take a shot or chug a beer.\u00a0 You\u2019ll be buzzed in no time.\u00a0 I spotted several but I\u2019m not going to tell you what they are so that you can have fun finding them yourselves.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m evil like that.<\/p>\n

Four out of Five Sci-Fives!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m officially based out of San Diego now and Saturday morning I started the daunting task of unpacking everything I own.\u00a0 Which is a lot of crap.\u00a0 Ugh.\u00a0 But it\u2019s awesome crap that I\u2019m not willing to throw or give away so whatever.\u00a0 Thanks to my OCD and my constant pursuit of organizational perfection, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[28,11,1],"tags":[69,144,341,482,511,751,796,1007],"class_list":["post-1897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","category-reviews","category-uncategorized","tag-andy-serkis","tag-caesar","tag-freida-pinto","tag-james-franco","tag-john-lithgow","tag-planet-of-the-apes","tag-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes","tag-tom-felton"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hotnerdgirl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}